


quantum

by rain_sleet_snow



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Childbirth, Established Relationship, F/M, Gen, Married Couple, POV Outsider, Past Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, The People's Revolution of the Glorious Twenty-Fifth of May, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-20
Updated: 2021-01-20
Packaged: 2021-03-12 06:02:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28880670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: Immediately after the birth of Young Sam, Mossy Lawn eats lunch with Willikins and boggles at true love.
Relationships: Mossy Lawn & John Keel, Mossy Lawn & Rosie Palm, Mossy Lawn & Samuel Vimes, Mossy Lawn & Willikins, Sybil Ramkin/Samuel Vimes
Comments: 12
Kudos: 96





	quantum

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SecondStarOnTheLeft](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SecondStarOnTheLeft/gifts).



> For Niamh!

The baby was healthy and strong, and the mother would be, given time to recover; Mossy saw little reason to worry. Even the father would do very well, once he had been peeled off the floor and carted away for some real rest. Now the emergency was over, Mossy had so many questions that his head was spinning, but he also had the strong impression that they would all be a good deal better off if he didn’t ask.

_John Keel_. He’d seen that body in the morgue, and he’d seen scrawny young Sam Vimes weep over it, and yet - had he? The boy was real; the body was real; but which one had truly been John Keel, the man Rosie had been half-afraid of but had trusted nonetheless -

“Doctor Lawn,” the Ramkin-Vimes’ butler said, intercepting both Mossy and his thoughts. “Allow me to offer you some refreshment. And a chance to refresh yourself. I sent a boy to your lodgings for a change of clothes.”

Mossy blinked at him. It seemed absurd that this pink-faced, immaculate senior servant should have sent someone to break into Mossy’s house, which even the unlicensed thieves looked sideways at - and yet of course he wouldn’t need to. He’d only need to step into Rosie’s Guildhall and ask for the spare key. Half the city - the whole of it, by midday - would know that Sam Vimes had dragged Mossy the pox doctor out to Scoone Avenue to save Her Grace, if he could. And everyone knew the value Old Stoneface set on his lady wife.

Mossy’s hands weren’t shaking yet, thanks to the brandy. It had been a closer-run thing than he intended to tell either parent, but he thought the Duchess already knew, and her butler had guessed.

“Given the - difficulty of the situation,” Willikins said, with the tiniest of hesitations, “the housekeeper and I thought it likely you might be needed to remain within call -“

The Duchess of Ankh, Mossy thought, was very much beloved. “Quite right, Willikins.” He stretched, somewhat belatedly, and tried to see something other than Sam Vimes’ desperate face, hear something besides the Duchess’s rasping, weakening breath. “I think Her Grace will do very well now, and the baby is as strong as any boy in the city. But I would like to keep an eye on them both. Just in case.” He rubbed both hands over his face. “Oh, and one more thing. Mrs Content’s well enough for straightforward cases but she went all to pieces when things turned for the worse. Send down to Mrs Proust in the city and ask her to recommend a nurse, just for the first week or two. You need a witch for a job like this.”

“We’ll see to it directly,” Willikins said, and took Mossy by the elbow with great politeness, ushering him off to one side. “Doctor Lawn, permit me to observe that you will be more comfortable when you’ve washed.”

Mossy looked down at his hands. There was blood on them, he realised, heavily caked beneath his fingernails, and now he could feel smears of it drying on his face, too. “Yes,” he said. 

The room he was shown to was comfortable and well-appointed; Mossy eyed it up and determined that the staff had decided to treat him as a professional man, due more than ordinary respect on account of his accomplishments, but not of any particular breeding. Far more specific than Commander Vimes would ever trouble to be, with his semi-permanent grimace and total disrespect for the city’s aristocrats, or the Duchess of Ankh, who was much too well-bred to care. Mossy cared principally that they’d provided him with a lot of hot water and soap, clean clothes, and a room close to his patient. And the housekeeper was standing over three maids while they boiled all his instruments to buggery, so he didn’t have to do it. It had been very easy, once the Duchess had returned to full consciousness and begun to find a little colour in her cheeks, once the baby’s healthy cries had echoed through the house, to get the staff to do precisely what he wanted.

By the time Mossy was clean, he was hungry, and his thoughts had passed from whoever John Keel had been to who the Duchess of Ankh and Commander Vimes were. He bundled his dirty clothes into a discreet laundry bin, and redressed himself, thinking.

He’d paid little attention to politics in Snapcase’s day; had never been much taken by them in Winder’s day, either, only sick of the corruption, the rich getting richer and the poor getting sicker, and the increasing number of broken bodies carried to his door by desperate friends and families. His attention had briefly been caught when young Havelock Vetinari had taken the Patrician’s chair, and at first nothing had seemed to change all that much - and now _everything_ was changing, faster and faster. Vimes hadn’t been part of it at first. The Watch had been as weak and venal and useless as ever, since the last shreds of stuffing got knocked out of them along with the lilac. But then the dragon had come, and Lady Sybil Ramkin had damned nearly been fed to it, and the Watch had brought it down and become - if not heroes - then something slightly less grubby than they once were. And they’d grown, hadn’t they, that business with the Patrician’s attempted assassinations, the war with Klatch - they’d risen to the occasion, and become something the city needed. The only broken bodies that came to Mossy’s door now came from barfights or muggings, and like as not the culprit was already banged up in a Watch house cell, and their Igor was patching up the cases that could still walk. And at the head of all of it was Sam Vimes, Old Stoneface, never smiling, eternally seething and glaring, never satisfied; arrested a dragon, arrested an army, arrested the Patrician himself, never giving a damn about anything besides his city, his Watch, and his wife, carrying the law like his own personal shield. Mossy had lost track of him after the Glorious Twenty-Fifth, but he’d seen him from a distance occasionally, slouching his way down the street with one of his watchmen in that rolling policeman’s gait. Never close enough to associate him with old John Keel.

Would he even have thought of the resemblance, on a different day?

He’d never seen Vimes close enough, or seen him with his wife long enough, to see the kind of desperation he’d seen today, either. Sheer bloody-minded refusal to give in, and then exhausted, still half-terrified relief. He’d never thought of them as a great romance, only a bit of an society oddity perhaps, but Rosie had said to him once (when she’d had more of Vetinari’s champagne than she wanted to admit) _that’s the real thing Mossy, the real deal, Mossy the way she looks at grubby old Sam Vimes it would make you weep_ \- and Mossy couldn’t deny that Vimes’ presence, his tight grip on the Duchess’s strong hand turned trembling with exhaustion, had been as great a tonic to his patient as any medicine.

She would still have died if Vimes hadn’t called on the only doctor in Ankh-Morpork who knew how to wash his hands. Eunice Proust talked, with ill-disguised envy, of a witch-midwife in Lancre so gifted they said she could birth the dawn from midnight, but Mossy had never met Gytha Ogg to judge her skills, and Lancre was a long way away.

Mossy was so dizzy with hunger and exhaustion he had to sit down on the side of the bed, and he hardly heard the tap on his door. 

“Come in,” he called, on the second attempt, and a neat housemaid poked her head around the door.

“Mister Willikins says as there’s a luncheon downstairs for you if you’d care to step down to it,” she said, and her eye found the laundry basket. “And I’m to take those nasty bloody clothes away before His Grace sees them.”

“Very well, thank you.” Mossy stepped out of her way. “Please see to it that they’re washed in the hottest water possible, with plenty of strong soap. I don’t mind stains but the clothes themselves must be very, very clean.”

The housemaid curtseyed in a way that suggested she’d taken offence. Given the trouble Mossy had initially had with the cook, who had said furiously that Mrs Content knew her place and her job and didn’t go round insisting on boiling all these horrible tools, Mossy did not care. 

She took up the laundry basket and carried it down the back stairs, leading Mossy to a well-polished panelled wooden door. It was close, unless Mossy missed his guess, to both the front hall and the dining room, and what would have been the duke’s library and alcohol collection if Commander Vimes weren’t the temperance type. A butler’s pantry, then, as the housekeeper’s parlour must be somewhere between the kitchens and the linens, but high enough up in the house that any visits from above wouldn't trouble the working staff. 

The housemaid knocked, and the door swung open to confirm Mossy’s guess. The room inside was cosy and well-kept, used to keep the more valuable silver under lock and key, and provided Willikins with a sort of private office. Mossy noticed that it was also crowded with more drinks cabinets than seemed reasonable, and that a luncheon for two had been set out: good, plain Morporkian food, but sustaining, well-cooked and made from better ingredients than most Morporkians could lay hands on.

“Thank you, Mildred,” Willikins said composedly. “Doctor Lawn, please join me.”

Mossy, whose stomach was rumbling, lost no time in obeying.

“Her Grace prefers to keep a good simple table,” Willikins announced, “in light of Commander Vimes’ personal tastes. I thought you would like to take a bite now, since you seem - if you’ll forgive my saying so! - tired.”

“Medicine is a physical calling as much as a cerebral one,” Mossy agreed, trying to haul his conversation up to Willikins’ elevated level. He was sure he remembered a little boy with sharpened pennies in the edge of his cap who could have grown up to be Willikins, but faced with this much primness it was hard to know. “I appreciate the thought, Willikins. I hope Her Grace is still sleeping? I know she’s a very active lady -” dragons weren’t a pet for the lazy, after all - “but she should take things easy, for a while.”

Willikins half-bowed without compromising the integrity of the wine bottle he was opening under Mossy’s surprised eye. “Indeed, Doctor Lawn. Her Grace is now sleeping, but she asked me to convey her most sincere thanks, and also instructed me to open this bottle that we might toast to her good health, and to the young master.”

“He’s two hours old, he won’t know,” Mossy said dryly, sitting down to his dinner. “I’m sure I’m very obliged to Her Grace for the thought. I drink very sparingly, though.”

He tried, but failed, to keep his eyes off the cabinets. They had been manoeuvred in carefully, but were clearly not meant for this room.

“Very wise, if I may say so. Commander Vimes never touches a drop,” Willikins said. “He prefers to have it out of his sight, though his guests are always welcome to sample the collection, of course.”

“He used to be a hard drinker, if I recall aright.” Mossy knew he did. Rosie had marvelled over it - _not one man in a hundred would change like that, Mossy!_ \- and when Mossy had teased her, she’d said very seriously that it was not Sam Vimes’ wife she envied, but his strength of will.

“Commander Vimes has only drunk in moderation in this house,” Willikins said, pouring them both a glass. It smelled rich, and looked like amber in a glass. “And after he married Her Grace, he stopped entirely. The day of the wedding, I believe.”

“Commendable,” Mossy said, already halfway through his lunch. He put down his fork suddenly, a terrible thought assailing him. “Willikins, at the risk of sounding ridiculous, I left -”

“The oven on. You mentioned something about a turkey when you arrived. I took the liberty of instructing young Frederic to extinguish any cooking apparatus in your home when he collected your clothes.”

Mossy relaxed. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” Willikins raised his glass. “A toast, Doctor Lawn.”

_True love_ , Mossy wanted to say, thinking about cigar cases and lilac and a madman who’d sprinted from the Shades to Pseudopolis Yard to search desperately for a woman who didn’t even know him yet - and Commander Vimes, stark bollock naked on his front doorstep, saying _I will make you the richest doctor in this city if you can save her life_.

“To Young Sam,” he said instead, raising his glass. “May he live to dandle his grandchildren on his knee, and never cause his mother a moment’s anxiety. Though boys being boys, I doubt it.”

Willikins grinned like a razor blade. “To Young Sam,” he said, without further commentary, and they both drank a toast to the luckiest baby in Ankh-Morpork.

There was a pause. Mossy finished his dinner, and Willikins, without being asked, put more food on his plate - somehow choosing exactly the items Mossy himself preferred. Witchcraft and sufficiently advanced skill were always indistinguishable.

“Her Grace has a place out in the country, doesn’t she?” Mossy said, having complimented the freshness of the food and the excellence of the cooking. “I assume it produces much of this bounty?”

Willikins nodded. “She’s very attached to it, I believe. Of course, Commander Vimes is not a countryman.”

You’d need a very large oyster knife to get Sam Vimes out of his city, Mossy thought, but watching his wife just about die in childbirth should do it. He coughed, and said more tactfully: “But to please her I think he might be willing to travel there. It occurs to me that - although bedrest will be necessary for a few more days, and I wouldn’t recommend travel before the month is out - fresh country air would be very good for Her Grace’s recovery. I’ll suggest it to her.”

“Very good,” Willikins said. “I will make some preparations behind the scenes, as it were.” He paused, and said: “I take it Their Graces should not expect to have any more children?”

“I’ll know better when I see how the Duchess heals,” Mossy hedged, and took a prevaricating bite of chicken. Willikins’ stare bored relentlessly into him, and he sighed and capitulated. He’d seen the look on the Duchess’s face when she opened her eyes: a woman who expected not to live. There would be no more children, whatever Mossy said, and though he intended to argue very forcefully that the couple should never try to conceive again he suspected his warnings were unnecessary. “No. Not if he values her life. Which I believe he does - beyond anything.”

_To Sam with love from your Sybil_ – Rosie had read the inscription on the cigar case aloud, while she went through John Keel’s things. It had made no sense at the time. It might make less sense now. Did Rosie know the truth, whatever it was? Had she guessed? She’d never said anything.

Mossy thought about the storm, and the strange things they said had happened up at the University, where the wizards broke reality seven days a week and twice on Octedays.

Willikins nodded again. If he knew anything, he didn’t mention it.

Mossy finished his wine. “I don’t know either of them very well,” he said. “But I should say they were a most devoted pair.”

“Indeed,” said Willikins, and poured a second toast. “To the Duke and Duchess of Ankh!”


End file.
